Koontz, Dean R. - Mr. Murder Read online

  "Honey, you mean 'hydrofoil,"

  " Paige said, taking her foot off the

  brake when the light turned green, and accelerating cautiously across

  the flooded intersection.

  "Yeah," Emily said. "Hyderfoil. We're in a hyderfoil, going to England

  to meet the queen. I'm going to have tea with the queen, drink tea and

  eat squid and talk about the family jewels."

  Paige almost laughed out loud at that one.

  "The queen doesn't serve squid," Charlotte said exasperatedly.

  "Bet she does," said Emily.

  "No, she serves crumpets and scones and trollops and stuff," Charlotte

  said.

  This time Paige did laugh out loud. She had a vivid image in her head,

  The very proper and gracious Queen of England inquiring of a gentleman

  guest if he would like a trollop with his tea, and indicating a garish

  hooker waiting nearby in Frederick's of Hollywood lingerie.

  "What's so funny?" Charlotte asked.

  Stifling her laugh, Paige lied, "Nothing, I was just thinking about

  something, something else, happened a long time ago, wouldn't seem funny

  to you now, just an old Mommy memory."

  The last thing she wanted was to inhibit their conversation.

  When she was in the car with them, she rarely turned on the radio.

  Nothing on the dial was half as entertaining as the Charlotte and Emily

  Show.

  As the rain began to fall harder than ever, Emily proved to be in one of

  her more loquacious moods. "It's a lot more fun going on a hyderfoil to

  see the queen than being in a submarine with a giant squid chomping on

  it."

  "The queen is boring," Charlotte said.

  "Is not."

  "Is too."

  "She has a torture chamber under the palace."

  Charlotte turned in her seat again, interested in spite of herself.

  "She does?"

  "Yeah," Emily said. "And she keeps a guy down there in an iron nc"

  "An

  iron mask?"

  "An iron mask," Emily repeated somberly.

  "Why?"

  "He's real ugly," Emily said.

  Paige decided both of them were going to grow up to be writers.

  They had inherited Marty's vivid and restless imagination. They would

  probably be as driven to exercise it as he was, although what they wrote

  would be quite different from their father's novels, and far different

  from the work of each other.

  She couldn't wait to tell Marty about submarines, hyderfoils, giant

  squids, french-fried tentacles, and trollops with the queen.

  She had decided to take Paul Guthridge's preliminary diagnosis to heart,

  attribute Marty's unnerving symptoms to nothing but stress, and stop

  worrying--at least until they got test results revealing something

  worse. Nothing was going to happen to Marty. He was a force of nature,

  a deep well of energy and laughter, indomitable and resilient. He would

  bounce back just as Charlotte had bounced off her deathbed five years

  ago. Nothing was going to happen to any of them because they had too

  much living to do, too many good times ahead of them.

  A fierce bolt of lightning--which seldom accompanied storms in southern

  California but which blazed in plenitude this time crackled across the

  sky, pulling after it a bang of thunder, as incandescent as any

  celestial chariot that might carry God out of the heavens on Judgment

  Day.

  Marty was only six or eight feet from the girls' bedroom door. He

  approached from the hinged side, so he could reach across for the knob,

  hurl the door inward, and avoid silhouetting himself squarely in the

  frame.

  Trying not to tread in the blood, he glanced down for just a second at

  the carpet, where the spatters of gore were smaller and fewer than at

  other points along the hall. He glimpsed an anomaly that registered

  only subconsciously at first, and he eased forward another step with his

  gaze riveted on the door again before fully realizing what he'd seen, an

  impression of the forward half of a shoe sole, faintly inked in red,

  like twenty or thirty others he'd already passed, except that the narrow

  portion of this imprint, the toe, was pointed differently from all the

  others, in the wrong direction, back the way he had come.

  Marty froze as he grasped the import of the shoeprint.

  The Other had gone as far as the girls' bedroom but not into it.

  He had turned back, having somehow reduced the flow of blood so

  dramatically that he was no longer clearly marking his trail--except for

  one telltale shoeprint and perhaps a couple that Marty hadn't noticed.

  Swinging around, holding the gun in both hands, Marty cried out at the

  sight of The Other coming at him from Paige's office, moving much too

  fast for a man with chest wounds and minus a pint or two of blood. He

  hit Marty hard, smashing in under the pistol, driving him into the

  gallery railing and forcing his arms up.

  Marty pulled the trigger reflexively while he was being carried

  backward, but the bullet ploughed into the hallway ceiling. The sturdy

  handrail slammed the small of his back, and a half-strangled scream

  escaped him as white-hot pain shot horizontally across his kidneys and

  played spike-shoed hopscotch up the knuckled staircase of his spine.

  Even as he screamed, he lost the gun. It popped out of his hands and

  arced back over his head into the empty vaulted space behind him.

  The tortured oak railing shuddered, a loud dry crack signaled imminent

  collapse, and Marty was sure they were going to crash into the

  stairwell. But the balusters did not give way, and the handrail held

  fast to the newel post at each end.

  Pressing relentlessly forward, The Other bent Marty backward and over

  the balustrade, trying to strangle him. Hands of iron.

  Fingers like hydraulic pincers driven by a powerful motor. Compressing

  the carotid arteries.

  Marty rammed a knee into his assailant's crotch, but it was blocked.

  The attempt left him unbalanced, with just one foot on the floor, and he

  was shoved farther across the balustrade, until he was both pinned

  against and balanced on the handrail.

  Choking, unable to breathe, aware that the worst danger was the

  diminution of blood to his brain, Marty clasped his hands in a wedge and

  drove them upward between The Other's arms, trying to spread them wider

  and break the strangulating grip. The assailant redoubled his efforts,

  determined to hold tight. Marty strained harder, too, and his

  overworked heart pounded painfully against his breastbone.

  They should have been equally matched, damn it, they were the same

  height, same weight, same build, in the same physical condition, to all

  appearances the same man.

  Yet The Other, though suffering two potentially mortal bullet wounds,

  was the stronger, and not merely because he had the advantage of a

  superior position, better leverage. He seemed to possess inhuman power.

  Face to face with his duplicate, washed by each hot explosive breath,

  Marty might have been gazing into a mirror, though the savage reflection

  before him was contorted by expressions he'd never seen on his own face.

  Bestial ra
ge. Hatred as purely toxic as cyanide.

  Spasms of maniacal pleasure twisted the familiar features as the

  strangler thrilled to the act of murder.

  With lips peeled back from his teeth, spittle flying as he spoke,

  impossibly but repeatedly tightening his stranglehold to emphasize his

  words, The Other said, "Need my life now, my life, mine, mine, now.

  Need my family, now, mine, now, now, now, need it, NEED IT!"

  Negative fireflies swooped and darted across Marty's field of vision,

  negative because they were the photo-opposite of the lanternbearing

  fireflies on a warm summer night, not pulses of light in the darkness

  but pulses of darkness in the light. Five, ten, twenty, a hundred, a

  teeming swarm. The looming face of The Other vanished in sections under

  the blinking black swarm.

  Despairing of breaking the assailant's grip, Marty clawed at the

  hate-filled face. But he couldn't quite reach it. His every effort

  seemed feeble, hopeless.

  So many negative fireflies.

  Glimpsed between them, the vicious and wrathful face of his wife's

  demanding new husband, the domineering face of his daughters' stern new

  father.

  Fireflies. Everywhere, everywhere. Spreading their wings of

  obliteration.

  Bang. Loud as a rifle shot. Second, third, fourth explosions-one right

  after another. Balusters breaking.

  The handrail cracked. Sagged backward. It no longer received support

  from the balusters that had gone to splinters under it.

  Marty stopped resisting the attacker and frantically tried to wrap his

  legs and arms around the railing in the hope of clinging to the anchored

  remains instead of hurtling out through the opening gap.

  But the center section of the balustrade disintegrated so completely, so

  swiftly, he couldn't find purchase in its crumbling elements, and the

  weight of his clutching assailant lent gravity more assistance than it

  required. As they teetered on the brink, however, Marty's actions

  altered the dynamics of their struggle just enough so The Other rolled

  past him and fell first. The assailant let go of Marty's throat but

  dragged him along in the top position. They dropped into the stairwell,

  crashed through the outer railing, instantly making kindling of it, and

  slammed into the Mexican-tile floor of the foyer.

  The drop had been sixteen feet, not a tremendous distance, probably not

  even a lethal distance, and their momentum had been broken by the lower

  railing. Yet the impact knocked out what little breath Marty had drawn

  on the way down, even though he was cushioned by The Other, who hit the

  Mexican tiles back-first with the resounding thwack of a sledgehammer.

  Gasping, coughing, Marty pushed away from his double and tried to

  scramble out of reach. He was breathless, lightheaded, and not sure if

  he had broken any bones. When he gasped, the air stung his raw throat,

  and when he coughed, the pain might not have been worse if he'd tried to

  swallow a tangled wad of barbed wire and bent nails. Scrambling

  cat-quick, which was what he had in mind, actually proved to be out of

  the question, and he could only drag himself across the foyer floor,

  hitching and shuddering like a bug that had been squirted with

  insecticide.

  Blinking away tears squeezed out of him by the violent coughing, he

  spotted the Smith & Wesson. It was about fifteen feet away, well beyond

  the point at which the transition from tile floor to hardwood marked the

  end of the entrance foyer and the beginning of the living room.

  Considering the intensity with which he focused on it and the dedication

  with which he dragged his half-numb and aching body toward it, the

  pistol might have been the Holy Grail.

  He became aware of a rumble separate from the sounds of the storm,

  followed by a thump, which he blearily assumed had something to do with

  The Other, but he didn't pause to look back. Maybe what he heard was a

  death twitch, heels drumming on the floor, one final convulsion.

  At the very least the bastard must be gravely injured.

  Crippled and dying. But Marty wanted to get his trembling hands on the

  gun before celebrating his own survival.

  He reached the pistol, clutched it, and let out a grunt of weary

  triumph. He flopped on his side, wheeled around, and aimed back toward

  the foyer, prepared to discover that his dogged pursuer was looming over

  him.

  But The Other was still flat on his back. Legs splayed out.

  Arms at his sides. Motionless. Might even be dead. No such luck.

  His head lolled toward Marty. His face was pale, glazed with sweat, as

  white and shiny as a porcelain mask.

  "Broke," he wheezed.

  He seemed able to move only his head and the fingers of his right hand,

  though not the hand itself. A grimace of effort, rather than pain,

  contorted his features. He lifted his head off the floor, and the

  stillvital fingers curled and uncurled like the legs of a dying

  tarantula, but he appeared incapable of sitting up or bending either leg

  at the knee.

  "Broke," he repeated.

  Something in the way the word was spoken made Marty think of a toy

  soldier, bent springs, and ruined gears.

  Steadying himself against the wall with one hand, Marty got to his feet.

  "Gonna kill me?" The Other asked.

  The prospect of putting a bullet in the brain of an injured and

  defenseless man was repulsive in the extreme, but Marty was tempted to

  commit the atrocity and worry about the psychological and legal

  consequences later. He was restrained as much by curiosity as by moral

  considerations.

  "Kill you? Love to." His voice was hoarse and no doubt would be so for

  a day or two, until he recovered from the strangulation attempt.

  "Who the hell are you?" Every raspy word reminded him of how fortunate

  he was to have lived to ask the question.

  The low rumble came again, the same noise he had heard when he'd been

  crawling toward the pistol. This time he recognized it, not the

  convulsions and drumming heels of a dying man, but simply the vibrations

  of the automatic garage door, which had been going up the first time,

  and which now was coming down.

  Voices arose in the kitchen as Paige and the girls entered the house

  from the garage.

  Less shaky by the second, and having caught his breath, Marty hurried

  across the living room, toward the dining room, eager to stop the kids

  before they saw anything of what had happened. For a long time to come,

  they would have trouble feeling comfortable in their own home, knowing

  an intruder had gotten in and had tried to kill their father.

  But they would be more seriously traumatized if they saw the destruction

  and the bloodstained man lying paralyzed on the foyer floor. Considering

  the macabre fact that the intruder was also a dead-ringer for their

  father, they might never sleep well in this house again.

  When Marty burst into the kitchen from the dining room, letting the

  swinging door slap back and forth behind him, Paige turned in surprise

  from the rack where she was hanging her raincoat. Stil
l in their yellow

  slickers and floppy vinyl hats, the girls grinned and tilted their heads

  expectantly, probably figuring that his explosive entrance was the start

  of a joke or one of Daddy's silly impromptu performances.

  "Get them out of here," he croaked at Paige, trying to sound calm,

  defeated by his coarse voice and all-too-evident tension.

  "What's happened to you?"

  "Now," he insisted, "right away, take them across the street to Vic and

  Kathy's."

  The girls saw the gun in his hand. Their grins vanished, and their eyes

  widened.

  Paige said, "You're bleeding. What--"

  "Not me," he interrupted, belatedly realizing that he'd gotten the blood

  of The Other all over his shirt when he'd fallen atop the man.

  "I'm okay."

  "What's happened?" Paige demanded.

  Yanking open the connecting door to the garage, he said, "We've had a

  thing here." His throat hurt when he talked, yet he was all but

  babbling in his urgent desire to get them safely out of the house,

  incoherent for perhaps the first time in his word-obsessed life. "A

  problem, a thing, Jesus, you know, like a thing that happened, some

  trouble"

  "Marty--"